Economic growth has many faces

Infographic | 29-05-2016

Employment growth and labour productivity growth are important indicators of economic development. In European cities and cities in OECD countries, productivity and wages generally increase with city size (European Commission, 2014). Recent OECD estimates suggest that productivity increases by 2% to 5% for every doubling of the population (Ahrend et al., 2015). In Europe, the two largest urban agglomerations, London and Paris, showed large labour productivity growth between 1980 and 2011.

Dutch urban regions, in contrast, are smaller and less dense in terms of residents and jobs. While employment in Dutch urban areas clearly grew between 1980 and 2011, productivity growth was smaller than in many other European urban regions. Recent research has shown that size and density can be partly compensated by a good position within international, national and regional networks (Van Oort et al., 2015). This position can be strengthened by improving connections between urban regions, coordinating large investment projects and increasing the complementarity between cities.

Source data

The scatter plot graphic on employment growth and labour productivity growth is based on data from the European Regional Database provided by Cambridge Econometrics (version April 2015). The European Regional Database contains socio-economic data for 27 European countries on a regional scale (NUTS3) for the period from 1980 to 2012.

Other formats

Related publications

Use of infographics

Unless stated otherwise, the Creative Commons (BY) licence applies to this infographic. For more information on this licence or the use of this infographic, please contact our graphics department (beeldredactie@pbl.nl).